Towards an Ontology-based Software Documentation Management - A Case Study

One of the main issues that a company has to face is the generation and maintenance of product documentation. In particular, several software houses have to take into account the frequent need of rapidly updating software applications, and the corresponding technical documentation, as a consequence of changes in the administrative rules and laws. In order to support documentation generation and maintenance processes, we performed an ontological analysis of these processes in a large Italian software house that produces and sells enterprise applications for small-to-medium sized enterprises. The goal of such a domain analysis was to build a conceptual model enabling a formal characterization of the main elements involved in software documentation. Such a formalization represents the “competence” of a system supporting documentation processes, since it enables it to answer competency questions representing the information needs of the documentation writers (e.g., “In which technical sheets/application manuals/operating manuals is used a given concept?”; “Which technical sheets belonging to a given operating manual do mention a given functionality/screenful/form field?”; “Which are the functionalities/screenfuls/technical sheets potentially impacted by the change of a given software module/file?”).